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But whence does this science derive its own initial laws?
The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain
for any soul that is able to apply them. What else is necessary,
Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until
it has reached perfect Intellection. "For," we read, "it is the
purest [perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom."
And, being the noblest method and science that exists it must
needs deal with Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is: as
Contemplative-Wisdom [or true-knowing] it deals with Being, as
Intellection with what transcends Being.
What, then, is Philosophy?
Philosophy is the supremely precious.
Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
It is the precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as
the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic does not consist of
bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are,
as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically
towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the
notions and of the realities.
Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own
nature, but merely as something produced outside itself,
something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid
up in itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a
clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has
no knowledge of propositions- collections of words- but it knows
the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call
their propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the
soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is
affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was
asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or
differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the
directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of
process to what other science may care for such exercises.
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